Digital Marketing Challenges and Changes 2015: The Best of Stone Temple Consulting

Here at Stone Temple Consulting one of our primary guiding principles is to be “surfing ahead of the wave” in digital marketing. That’s why we have this big blue wave on the wall of our office common area where we all see it every day.

As I look back over our content from this past year, I see many examples of the many challenges and changes that happened in digital marketing in 2015. The wave was huge this year, and it took some skillful surfing to keep out in front of it!

Here are several top lists of our most popular content published this past year. I’ve ranked blog posts and video content separately, and ranked blog posts by number of social shares and traffic driven, and videos by number of YouTube views. For traffic and views, of course, we can only include content published here on our blog or on our YouTube Channel.

I also included December 2014 in this survey, as late-in-the-year posts could get short-changed if they gained shares of traffic over time.

We hope revisiting these posts helps you catch up on some trends you might have missed, or just serves as a reminder of how exciting and volatile digital marketing is these days!

Our 10 Most Shared Blog Posts of 2015

On this blog and guest posts elsewhere by STC authors, as tracked by Buzzsumo.

“In this post, I will focus on how you can benefit from the new deal between Google and Twitter. You will need to be active on Twitter to obtain these benefits, but I will include some tips for those of you who are just getting started — you can still benefit from this development if you’re doing the right things.”

“The term “content marketing” means different things to different people. I continually run into people who get the general idea, but they’re missing some of the fundamental pieces of how it works, and hence they don’t execute it as effectively as they should.”

“The debate on the activity level on Google+ has raged for years. How many users are really active on it? Is the place a ghost town? Why hasn’t Google shut it down already? Well, I decided to put it to the test, so I did a hardcore analysis of 516,246 randomly selected Google+ profiles, and this post has the scoop for you.”

“Google+ seems to be the social network that people love to hate. The industry almost has an internal clock about when to print the next article about Google+ dying. So what’s the real story here? Is Google+ going to die soon? Should you invest time in it? I will outline the way I look at it in today’s post, and while I will bring in many discussion points, bear in mind that for Google it’s all about the data.”

“Recently, Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes surprised many of us with a remark he made during his keynote Q&A with Danny Sullivan at SMX East in New York City. Illyes said that he recommended webmasters not remove the rel=author tag from their site content. In this post I examine why he might have said that, and what any form of author authority in Google might look like in the future.”

“Like many other areas of marketing, SEO incorporates elements of science. It becomes problematic for everyone, though, when theories that haven’t been the subject of real scientific rigor are passed off as proven facts. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Stone Temple Consulting’s Mark Traphagen is here to teach us a thing or two about the scientific method and how it can be applied to our day-to-day work.”

“We finally have Google confirmation of what some other Google+ observers and I have been saying for more than a year: The changes we’ve seen in the past year, including the stripping away of some major features, were not a slow killing of Google+. Quite the opposite — they were preparations for its reinvention as a tighter, more focused product which might finally have a unique appeal that could attract new users.”

“In this study, we look at the impact of the so called “Mobilegeddon” update. This update was viewed as being a potentially very large update. At SMX Munich, Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji was quoted as saying that its impact would be larger than Panda or Penguin. In addition, at SMX Advanced, yesterday, June 2nd, Google’s Gary Illyes reiterated that the Mobile Update indeed had a bigger impact than Penguin and Panda combined.”

” User experience and the quality of your content have an incredibly broad impact on your SEO efforts. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Stone Temple’s Eric Enge shows you how paying attention to your users can benefit your position in the SERPs.”

“When you first start in content marketing, you usually have little to no audience of your own for your content. If you’re a major brand, you may be able to develop this quickly, but it’s still extremely helpful to get visibility on third-party sites to grow your reputation and visibility as a producer of fantastic content, and to also net links to your site.”

Our 10 Highest Traffic Blog Posts in 2015

“The debate on the activity level on Google+ has raged for years. How many users are really active on it? Is the place a ghost town? Why hasn’t Google shut it down already? Well, I decided to put it to the test, so I did a hardcore analysis of 516,246 randomly selected Google+ profiles, and this post has the scoop for you.”

“In this study, we look at the impact of the so called “Mobilegeddon” update. This update was viewed as being a potentially very large update. At SMX Munich, Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji was quoted as saying that its impact would be larger than Panda or Penguin. In addition, at SMX Advanced, yesterday, June 2nd, Google’s Gary Illyes reiterated that the Mobile Update indeed had a bigger impact than Penguin and Panda combined.”

“Back in February of this year, we published a study showing how often Google responds to search queries with rich answers. So we decided to take a fresh look and see how much Google has expanded their use of these types of enhanced search results. (A “rich answer” is any attempt by Google to answer the searcher’s query in search results in a way not requiring a click through to a website.)”

“Back on February 4th, 2015, the news broke on a new deal between Google and Twitter, and on May 19th the the new deal went live. Back on February 10, 2015, we took a snapshot of how Google was indexing tweets before the deal went into effect. Today, we are releasing data on how Google is currently indexing tweets, now that the deal has been live for a number of weeks.”

“What you see before you is the result of analyzing more than 2 million Western language tweets out of over 4 million Tweets we collected. In this paper we will outline the results of analyzing that data to learn and understand what drives behavior on Twitter. One of the main goals: to see what really drives retweets, favorites, and replies.”

NOTE: This was the preliminary test before the post-deal test in #4 above. “In this post we will show you which tweets Google places the most value on, and hence help you understand how you can position yourself to derive SEO benefit from this change in the marketing landscape.”

“In a test of over 850,000 search queries, we found that Google offered some form of rich answer (AKA a knowledge box) 19+% of the time. While our queries were selected to be more likely to show a rich answer result, this still shows just how far they have come. In this article, I will share the details of our findings, and I will also discuss how well Google is doing in attributing results to their original sources.”

“As a part of the IMEC Labs Test Group, we have been running some tests to see whether or not tweeting a link to a page that is otherwise invisible to Google can cause it to be crawled and indexed. The short story is this is: Yes, it might.”

(Major update in 2015 to this 2014 post) “How far along is Google from using social media signals as ranking factors? Can Google use engagement and follower metrics from Twitter and Facebook to evaluate the authority of an individual? To me, the answers to those questions were the buried headlines in a Google Webmaster Help video by Matt Cutts. Even though Matt is currently on an extended hiatus from his job as head of Google’s web spam team, I believe what he had to say in this video remains the case today.”

“Have you ever seen those URLs that people sometimes include on their pages, but which are not implemented as physical links? It can be frustrating if someone uses some of your content, and then gives you a citation like that, but it does happen. Did you ever wonder if Google treats those “URL Mentions” as a ranking factor?”

Our 5 Most Viewed Videos of 2015

View counts are views on YouTube. For videos from our various series, click the title to see a full transcript and links to all resources mentioned in each video.

“For years now Google has given huge preference to Wikipedia for a large number of knowledge-seeking queries. This has actually been called into question as of late. A report published in July showed that Wikipedia had experienced a significant drop in organic search traffic sent by Google. Eric and Mark are here to tell you why Google Still Loves Wikipedia!”

“Forming strong relationships with influencers can become the backbone of an effective content marketing plan. However, while you might find yourself trying and trying to get the attention of one, the influencer can still ignore you. In this episode of Here’s Why, Mark and Eric will help you find out why your efforts are going unnoticed, and how you can turn it all around!”

“Your CTO will probably have different goals from your CFO, while you and your CMO might have different opinions on the best way to move forward. Knowing how to address all of the varying concerns from the C-Level is what we’re here to help you with.”